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Report from the House of Commons Reform Committee on Rebuilding the House

It is a great pleasure to follow my friend, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher). I am sure that I speak on behalf of all who know him in saying that I am delighted that he is back in the House after his recent illness and hope that he will soon be completely fit again. What a pleasure it is to take part in a debate that, effectively, was initiated by another Staffordshire friend, the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright). If he will forgive my saying so, from the moment that he came into the House he has been an exemplary next-door neighbour, and he has been an exemplary Chairman of his Committee too. The House owes him a great deal. His legacy is the report that we are discussing; the effectiveness of that legacy will depend on how truly people implement it. I say that because there are two or three weaknesses that one must face up to. First, the hon. Gentleman's Committee was fairly constrained in its terms of reference, a point alluded to by the hon. Member for North-East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel). Secondly, the Committee was time-constrained. It was set up in a bit of a hurry and—I chose my words carefully—in a little bit of a panic reaction. It was to the credit of the hon. Gentleman and all who served on the Committee with him that they produced such a sensible and workmanlike document in such a short space of time. However, we must not become euphoric, because there is a danger that the changes advocated in the report could become cosmetic. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central made an important point towards the end of his speech, when he referred to the enormous majorities in recent Parliaments. We all have to recognise that, to a large degree, the power of the House of Commons depends on the size of the Government's majority. I had the good fortune to be elected to this place in 1970. The Government of Ted Heath had a workable but not an enormous majority. They had to fight for some of their policies and, in the case of the European debate—I mention this merely as a historical event and not to antagonise my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash)—they were dependent on votes from the Labour party to get that key element of their policy through the House of Commons. Because of that, that Government had an implicit respect for the House of Commons. After that there was what I will always consider the unnecessary election of February 1974—I spoke against it at the time—when the Prime Minister asked who governed the country. It was he who should have done so; he did not need to go to the country. He went to the country and he lost his majority. Paradoxically, he got a majority of the popular vote, but he lost his majority. From February 1974 until March 1979, this place truly had power and influence, because there was never a vote that the Government could absolutely accurately predict that they would win. Then we moved to Mrs. Thatcher's first Government, for whom the arithmetic was not very different from that for Edward Heath's Government. Again, the Government had to argue. I well remember when there was a majority of 42 going with 21 signatures with my now noble Friend Lord Higgins to see a Cabinet Minister and saying that we could not wear a particular policy, which was subsequently significantly amended. All that went in 1983, after the longest suicide note in history, when we had the next Thatcher Government. Since the brief period between 1992 and 1997, when John Major had a dwindling and at the end non-existent majority, we have had Governments with majorities that have been so large that the House of Commons has not really been able to do anything about it. I have often thought that the famous motion that Dunning moved, I think in 1782—that the power of the Crown had increased, was increasing and ought to be diminished—has been the subtext for those of us who have been unhappy about the overweening power of the Executive. The power of the Executive has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished. Whether the reforms before us this evening will have that effect I know not. We stand on the brink of a general election, and although I love this place with a passion, I will not be in the next House of Commons, whatever the electorate does. I just wonder what will happen, because of the power of the Whips, with perhaps 300 new Members in the new Parliament, although I do not say that in any vicious sense. There has to be a whipping system, as others have said. Party is essential for civilised democracy in this country—it is part of the system—particularly if we are not to abandon, as I do not wish us to abandon, the separation of powers. However, influence is not just overt; it is also covert. When we look at the proposals—we will vote on them next week—we have to remember that there are more ways of influencing a Member than the crudest and the simplest, just as we have to remember that any system devised for the examination and scrutiny of legislation is open to abuse, whether the abuse of the filibuster, if we have unlimited time, or, as we have seen in recent years, the abuse of the timetable, which has created the absurd situations referred to so graphically by the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris). Time is terribly important in this House. If we are to constrain our time so much, for whatever reasons—and there were some good reasons for changing the hours in 1997—we must recognise that there has to be a self-denying ordinance on the part of the Government in relation to the amount of legislation that they place before the House. I shall conclude by making one or two specific remarks about the proposals. In my memo to the Committee, I suggested that there should be a properly appointed Committee of Selection, chaired by either the Speaker or the Chairman of Ways and Means, that would, to a degree, be the fount of appointments. The hon. Member for North-East Derbyshire made some important points in that regard. Elections are not the only answer to having more independent Select Committees. Whether we have elections for their Chairmen and members or not, however, we want a Committee of Selection that will be the creature of the House and not the creature of the Executive. We also want a business Committee, and again I would favour one that was the creature of the House and not of the Executive. It would be entirely logical for the Chairman of Ways and Means to preside over the Committee of Selection, and for the Speaker to preside over the business Committee. There are other countries in which something like that happens. It is also terribly important that, as we move forward towards sensible reform, we do not abandon some of the things that mark the traditions of this place. I think it was the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) who made a jocular reference to the new carpet earlier. The new carpet is not a Cyril Lord concoction with a gaudy pattern on it, and none of us would have wanted it to be. It bears the two red stripes, which are symbolic in our parliamentary life. It is therefore part of our traditional Chamber. I make no apology for being a traditionalist, which is why I have tabled amendments to get rid of the silly notion of calling everyone who is in charge of a Committee a piece of furniture. That is a nonsense up with which we do not need to put. Certainly the great women in recent parliamentary history, such as the late Gwyneth Dunwoody and the very much alive Baroness Boothroyd, would have scoffed at such a suggestion. Indeed, I have heard Baroness Boothroyd do so—not in this particular context, but in others. The proposals would bring about an utterly unnecessary cosmetic change. One of the reasons that I oppose them is that, if I love anything as much as I love the House of Commons, I love the English language. Next year, we shall celebrate one of the seminal works in the English language, the King James Bible. It would be a pretty poor parliamentary recognition of the importance of the greatest worldwide language since Latin if we started in this place to call people pieces of furniture. I hope that my minor amendments will be accepted, even perhaps by the Chairman of the Committee that produced this report. For the rest, I will vote for the motions to implement his report. I think that I shall vote for every proposal, although I might just reflect on one or two things. The report contains a small series of imperfect but necessary steps, and I hope that they will serve well the new House of Commons and those who sit here, and help to redress the balance that we all want to see redressed.